The World Goes On (2017)
László Krasznahorkai (1954)
311 pages
I struggle to know how to even begin to classify the twenty-one pieces in Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai’s anthology The World Goes On. All but one are written in a stream of conscious style of generally paragraph-long sentences, with the paragraphs themselves often spanning many pages. Each challenges a reader to follow a kind of frenzied inner monologue of a restless mind. (The one exception to this style I’ll leave for readers to discover – certainly, its structure was a first for me…)
The collection can broadly be divided into two groups. The first section, roughly half of the pieces, Krasznahorkai’s labels HE SPEAKS, with the remaining half in a second section labeled HE NARRATES; a single, final story has its own section HE BIDS FAREWELL. Despite the similarities in approach across the pieces, those of the first (and third) section have a distinct impact compared to those in the second.
The opening set of pieces tend to be written in a first-person voice, as essays that unspool personal meditations on the world and our place in it. For these, the stream of conscious telling serves to reinforce the struggle to find sensible explanations as one contemplates the complexities and contradictions of our world.
Thus, for example, in the opening story, Wandering-Standing, the protagonist (Krasznahorkai?) describes a desperate desire to leave his hometown – “intolerable, cold, sad, bleak, and deadly” (5) – only to discover that wherever he goes he has not actually left behind what he wished to escape. In He Wants to Forget, he despairs of our present-day world, finding it to be an
age [that] wants to forget it has gambled away everything on its own, without outside help, and that it can’t blame alien powers, or fate, or some remote baleful influence; we did this ourselves: we have made away with gods and with ideals. (17)
The title story considers the irrevocable consequences of the events of 9/11, which he finds marks a clear before and after for our civilization:
I knew at once, watching the flaming, tumbling Towers, and then envisioning them again and again, and I knew that without a brand-new language it was impossible to understand this brand-new era in which, along with everyone else, I suddenly found myself. (27)
And, finally, The Second Lecture considers the minor, almost invisible, constraints the world we have created places on us; a vagrant standing at the end of a platform, beyond a yellow line meant to mark off the area as prohibited, inspires a meditation on the how we internalize so many of the rules we live by.
The particular instinct that prohibits setting foot in just this area doesn’t only prohibit setting foot in it, but erases it from consciousness as it were …. Any forbidden zone of this sort … not only explicitly communicates its unavoidable randomness, but offers exemplary proof that the regulations of our human world (including the simplest ones) are not just unfathomable but unchallengeable. These regulations … even the least significant ones, are impossible to separate from their invisible corpus; laws such as these – even the mildest ones – become visible solely when they are violated, and can be apprehended in operation only through a certain element of scandal, that is, via the introduction of a certain degree of danger. (46)
Somehow, a particularly trenchant observation in our current moment, when seemingly innocent mistakes or inoffensive actions can have prejudicial, and even fatal, consequences.
The second section shifts to a short story format; here the stream of conscious telling often comes with particular phrases repeated many times over, giving the stories a frenetic pacing. In A Drop of Water, the protagonist finds himself in a sacred city in India, which he desperately wants to leave but, like a nightmare, he can never quite find a way out. That Gagarin describes the search for truth by a man obsessed over what might have led to the death of the first Soviet Cosmonaut. In many of these stories, the telling leaves a reader almost exhausted for the protagonist: it’s hard not to feel that most of them could use a meditation course to help quiet their frantic thoughts.
Several of these stories return to the themes of the first section, exploring the nature of our world. Thus, in Downhill on a Forest Road, a driver suffers the contingency inherent in everyday events, discovering in an instant that
everything, including a catastrophe, has a moment-by-moment structure – a structure that is beyond measurement or comprehension, one that is maddeningly complex … because of one choice or another, of more choices and still more choices ad infinitum, those maddening had-we-but-known choices impossible to conceptualize because the situation we find ourselves in is complicated, determined by something that is in the nature of neither God nor the devil, something whose ways are impenetrable to us and are doomed to remain so because chance is not simply a matter of choosing, but the result of that which might have happened anyway. (221)
And, more bleakly, Journey in a Place Without Blessings tells the story of a cleric who takes drastic action with his church and congregation in the face of a loss of faith:
The diocesan bishop sits sadly among the congregation and he says: this is the end of the reading of the Scriptures, for there has been no understanding. (277)
Each of the pieces in The World Goes On pulls a reader in, enveloping us in a fast-moving current of ideas and observations. I’ll admit that I was knocked off balance in the first pieces, finding it difficult to wrap my head around them. But as Krasznahorkai’s style grew on me, I came around, letting myself be fully absorbed into his storytelling.
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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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